Blog Archives

Here’s something to get your day started right.

Otis…

27 Down In The Valley (Stereo)

[photo credit: Soule Mama]

There was slush on Thursday and snow on Friday, so much so that I got to leave work early. I walked through Central Park and the strangest thing happened. The grey-blue sky suddenly got light and yellow and the sun came out. Fat snow flakes continued to fall–a snow shower. I was close to Tavern on the Green and stopped walking to look in the sky.

I smiled. It is near now…

Then, on Saturday afternoon, the wife and I were on our way uptown on the 1 train. A group of four men sang an old Motown song for the car. They finished before we arrived at the next stop when one of the guys stepped forward and addressed the passengers, “May I have your attention, please. Don’t you worry, have no fear, Spring will soon be here.”

I don’t care how much is snows now. Baseball, she’s a-coming…

[photo credit: Dan Peters]

Speaking of drinking, here’s a scene from the cheeriest booze-soaked flick of them all:

I’m not a drinker but I’ve always liked the idea of a Bloody Mary.

Dig these cool variations…

Over at SI.com, Cliff takes a look at more off-season signings and how they might play out:

Mike Cameron, CF, Red Sox

The 2009 Red Sox’s dirty little secret was that, save for the perpetually underrated J.D. Drew (10.5 runs above average in right field per UZR), their outfield defense was a disaster. That Jason Bay was 13 runs below average in left field may not have been a huge surprise, but Jacoby Ellsbury, having finally taken over center field full time with Coco Crisp in Kansas City, was even worse. Ultimate Zone Rating listed Ellsbury as 18.6 runs below average in center, a shockingly poor performance for a young player known for his speed. Together Bay and Ellsbury cost the Red Sox three wins in the field, which is one reason why Bay was allowed to sign elsewhere and Mike Cameron was brought in to play center and push Ellsbury to left.
Cameron’s center field defense has been worth almost exactly a win for the Brewers in each of the last two seasons, while Ellsbury played 346 1/3 innings (less than a quarter of the time he spent in center last year) in left field in 2008 and was nearly a win above average in that brief time. Don’t expect that sort of brilliance from Ellsbury this year, but even if he is merely worth one win over a typical 1,200 innings, the Red Sox could experience a whopping five-win upgrade on defense alone. Some of that will be given back in the downgrade from Bay’s bat, which was worth five wins in 2009 according to VORP, to Cameron’s, which is typically worth roughly half of that, but that massive upgrade on defense keeps the Sox’s new outfield arrangement well above replacement, and well above their 2009 performance.

Estimated upgrade: 2.5 wins

Back when, the WPIX late-night schedule after the 10 o’clock news was The Odd Couple, The Honeymooners, Star Trek and then the Twilight Zone.

The Odd Couple was a good show to fall asleep to…still love that opening:

Zip Zip:

Huh’oooh it can core a apple.

Woman with Necklace (Studio Version), by Arshile Gorky (1936)

Never too young to start diggin…

A young head hits the stacks under the watchful eye of Jared Boxx at Big City Records, where you can find records like this:

I don’t know about you, but a rich cup of hot chocolate would do me good today:

Say Werd.

Over at River Avenue Blues, Ben Kabak has the latest on what the Parks Department has planned for the plot of land where the old Yankee Stadium sits.

[photo credit: Daniella Zalcman]

They’re playing baseball somewhere? Go figure that.

New York City got hit in the side of the face with a Junior Barnes slushball yesterday. I trooped around some on the Upper West Side and it was fugliosity, man. This morning the slush turned into snow. The eight flights of stairs that I walk down each day were so bad that I crouched down and made like a sled. I saw sofa abandoned sofa cushions on the way down–the neighbhorhood kids must have had fun last night. The rest of the sofa was at the bottom of the stairs–maybe they had too much fun.

Anyhow, it is a comedy show but New Yorkers are tough and many of us braved the elements and made it in to woik.

Here was my soundtrack:

Breakfast in Bed, by Mary Cassatt (1897)

Eastward, Ha!  Enter The Cradle of Love.

For John Schulian, Jay Jaffe and Matt B:

William Faulkner on the origins of The Sound and the Fury, one of his most acclaimed novels:

It began with a mental picture. I didn’t realize at the time it was symbolical. The picture was of the muddy seat of a little girl’s drawers in a pear tree, where she could see through a window where her grandmother’s funeral was taking place and report what was happening to her brothers on the ground below. By the time I explained who they were and what they were doing and how her pants got muddy, I realized it would be impossible to get all of it into a short story and that it would have to be a book. And then I realized the symbolism of the soiled pants, and that image was replaced by the one of the fatherless and motherless girls climbing down the rainpipe to escape from the only home she had, where she had never been offered love or affection or understanding.

I had already begun to tell the story through the eyes of the idiot child, since I felt that it would be more effective as told by someone capable only of knowing what happened, but not why. I saw that I had not told the story that time. I tried to tell it again, the same story through the eyes of another brother. That was still not it. I told it for a third time through the eyes of the third brother. That was still not it. I tried to gather the pieces together and fill in the gaps by making myself the spokesman. It was still not complete, not until fifteen years after the book was published, when I wrote as an appendix to another book the final effort to get the story told and off my mind, so that I myself could have some peace from it. It’s the book I feel tenderest towards. I couldn’t leave it alone, and I never could tell it right, though I tried hard and would like to try again, though I’d probably fail again.

I read this passage almost twenty years ago and am still fascinated by it. The idea that Faulkner created an enduring work of art and yet felt that he failed is amazing. Can a great work of art be a failure? Why not? Nothing is ever that simple. Apocalypse Now comes to mind as a brilliant movie that is also a mess. So does Raging Bull.

Martin Scorsese once said, “Raging Bull is a about a man who loses everything and then regains it spiritually.” Based on this statement, I think the movie fails as a story because I don’t think that DeNiro’s Jake LaMotta ever reaches that kind of grace, or I don’t think it was conveyed by the filmmakers in a convincing way. That said, if this is a failure, sign me up! Because Raging Bull features some of the most hypnotic, brilliant filmmaking–especially the editing and the sound editing–of any American movie. It is often very funny, though on some level, it is also turgid and humorless.

Raging Bull was DeNiro’s pet project. He had to talk Scorsese into making it and they, in turn, had to talk Paul Schrader (who wrote Taxi Driver) into revising the script. In the book, Martin Scorsese: A Journey, the director talked about what hooked him into the project:

The motive became to achieve an understanding of a self-destructive lifestyle–of a person who was destructive to the people around him and to himself–who finally eased up on himself and on those other people, and somehow made peace with life.

I used Raging Bull as a kind of rehabilitation, thinking all the time it was pretty much my last picture in L.A., or America.

It’s not really a boxing movie. It’s about Scorsese saving his own life and finding some kind of redemptive thread in LaMotta’s story. It’s about DeNiro getting so deep inside of a character–Scorsese said that he played LaMotta like a brick wall–it didn’t matter how much of a creep the character was, there was a sliver of humanity there and that was worth exploring. It is about the obsessions of both men.

Which brings me back to Faulkner, in a letter written to the editor Malcolm Cowley in November of 1944:

As regards any specific book, I’m trying primarily to tell a story, in the most effective way I can think of, the most moving, the most exhaustive. But I think even that is incidental to what I am trying to do, taking my output (the course of it) as a whole. I am telling the same story over and over, which is myself and the world…I’m trying to say it all in one sentence, between one Cap and one period. I’m still trying to put it all, if possible, on one pinhead. I don’t know how to do it. All I know to do is to keep trying in a new way. I’m inclined to think that my material, the South, is not very important to me. I just happen to know it, and don’t have time in one life to learn another one and write at the same time. Though the one I know is probably as good as another, life is a phenomenon but not a novelty, the same frantic steeplechase toward nothing everywhere and man stinks the same stink no matter where in time.

Scorsese was an emotional mess when he made Raging Bull. I think that comes across in the movie. It is a stunning work, brilliant and flawed.

For a good behind-the-scenes take, check out this long Vanity Fair piece by Richard Schickel.

Assemblage, by Kurt Schwitters (1919)

This will help you make these:

Dig this inteview with Bronx Banter favorite, Perry Barber:

Another killer kut: